Miami Vice (revisited)

One of my first posts to this blog was a review of Miami Vice, and since the DVD just hit the stores this week, I had the opportunity to give it another viewing. As is customary these days, two DVDs were released: an unrated director's cut, and a theatrical cut. I gave the unrated director's cut a looksy, and if I may say so, this is the cut that should have been released in the theaters over the summer!

With about 20 additional minutes of footage, many flaws of the theatrical release were corrected, characters and relationships were fleshed out a bit more, and things overall felt much more cohesive. I'd even go so far as to say that more homage was paid to the original TV series, which was a big complaint from the fans—the biggest homage being the recreation of the "In the Air Tonight" scene as Crockett and Tubbs drove to the meeting with Yero and his crew (though with a modern remix, not the Phil Collins original). I think Michael Mann even did a little side homage to himself, when he played music from The Insider over the diner scene between Tubbs and Trudy (itself a newly-inserted scene).

But with all this new footage, I felt much more at ease with the casting and the screen time allotted (one of my original problems with the theatrical cut was that Jamie Foxx wasn't given enough screen time, and as such felt irrelevant as Tubbs). The chemistry between Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx felt more authentic, too. And this time around, I felt like I could see this film from a new perspective. Which is to say, when I saw Miami Vice in the theaters, I tried to keep in mind that I was watching "Crockett and Tubbs", but even though I never watched the series as a kid, my mind still wanted to see Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in those roles. This time around, though, I focused less on the original series elements and instead saw it from the perspective of a Michael Mann crime movie—and when viewed from that perspective, it succeeds in spades! I won't belabor how brilliant a filmmaker Mann is, because I think I've done that enough already, but he does immerse you so deep within the criminal world that it becomes hard to see your own day-to-day world the same way.

Granted, it was still an intense watch, because dialogue comes at you so fast that it's hard to digest a lot of the information contained therein. But with more time for a proper edit of the movie, Miami Vice now fully delivers. (And I don't know why it's being hailed as unrated, because you don't see anything you didn't see the first time.) After seeing the director's cut, I'll raise my rating of Miami Vice a notch, to an 8 out of 10.